Tennis in The New Yorker

Earlier this year, the Times Book Review held an impromptu tennis tournament between the game’s finest chroniclers. I won’t quibble with their selection of semifinalists—David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, John McPhee, Martin Amis—but, given that each has contributed to this magazine, I wondered how tennis had figured in their New Yorker work.

First, the slackers. Wallace wrote the definitive story on Roger Federer, but in seven short stories for this magazine, he mentioned tennis only once, in the story “Good People,” from 2007: “Her tennis shoes had little things doodled on them from sitting in her class lectures.” Lolita played tennis—“It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to return, having as it did not twist or sting to its long elegant hop”—but in more than fifty pieces in the magazine, Nabokov only cited the game in “Portrait of my Mother,” in 1949:

There was the old tennis court, which had been the scene of desultory lobbing rallies in the nineties and which, by the time I was a boy, weeds had effaced with the thoroughness of a felt eraser wiping out a geometrical problem on a blackboard.

The other half of the draw has represented the sport well in the magazine’s pages. In 1968, John McPhee profiled Robert Twynam, the head lawnskeeper at Wimbledon (“Twynam’s lawn—nine hundred and thirty square yards, one-fifth of an acre—is the best of its kind, and Twynam has such an affection for it that he spends a great deal of time just looking at it.”), and wrote a Postscript, in 1993, for Arthur Ashe:

Standing there in his twenties, his lithe body a braid of cables, his energy without apparent limit, in a court situation indescribably bad, and all he does is put his index finger on the bridge of his glasses and push them back up the bridge of his nose.

McPhee had written about this version of Ashe twenty-four years earlier, in “Levels of the Game,” perhaps his finest piece on any subject. “The toss is high and forward,” McPhee wrote, of Ashe’s serve. “If the ball were allowed to drop it would, in Ashe’s words, ‘make a parabola and fall to the grass three feet in front of the baseline.’ He has practiced tossing a tennis ball just so thousands of times. But he is going to hit this one. His feet draw together. His body straightens and tilts forward far beyond the point of balance. He is falling.”

And then there’s Amis, whose tennis contributions to The New Yorker outnumber that of the others. (We’ve already cited him once this week). Throughout the nineties, Amis chronicled the game from both sides of the Atlantic. He was enamored with the idiosyncrasies of the era’s competitors: Chang, Becker, Sampras, and, above all, Courier, who “outsweats every other man on the planet. I mean no disrespect when I say that Jim’s game is based on sweat. Some players trust their wrists, their knees, their body-swivel, their back-bend. When push comes to shove, Courier looks to his armpits.” Later, in an open letter to the then-struggling Tim Henman, Amis suggested the most important thing he could do was change his name: Henman was, in Amis’s estimation, “the first human being called Tim to achieve anything at all.” He also thought the game itself could use a rebranding. “‘Tennis’ sounds hopelessly fey and effete,” he wrote. “What about ‘crackerball,’ which moreover to recommend it sounds like a drug likely to enhance performance?”

Kitty Carraway, divining his intention just as, on the tennis courts, she always seemed to know in advance, by some intuition, where her opponent’s shots were going to land, held him off with her strong right arm. Kitty did not go in for postures of surrender.

Since the war, the famous old amateur tennis tournaments have considerably resembled undergraduate conferences on world disarmament. The participants—the youthful hot-eyed debaters and the tweedy, benevolent faculty sponsors—meet in an atmosphere of virtue and intelligence and unanimously resolve to do away with all nasty explosions, and everyone pretends not to know that the bright young scholar who presided over the previous year’s meeting has since gone to work for the Hercules Powder Company.

The magazine’s most prolific tennis writer, however, was Herbert Warren Wind. (He was also the magazine’s most prolific golf writer, making him required reading in the nation’s country clubs.) He contributed dispatches from Queens nearly every year between 1962 and 1989, a span during which the magazine also published a poem, “The Old Pro’s Lament,” by Paul Petrie, that turned tennis into metaphor:

Each year, the court expands, The net moves back, the ball Hums by—with more spin.

Cover by Constantin Alajalov.

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